Businesses are being warned to brace themselves for a possible traffic spike next week caused by the Kama Sutra worm, which could slow down internet traffic and possibly even slow e-mail response times as infected machines try to communicate with businesses.

The virus, dubbed "Nyxem.E" among other names, was first reported in mid-January, and is now thought to have infected more than half a million computers worldwide. Security vendor IronPort warned on Thursday that computers infected with this virus are hard coded to begin an attack on February 3rd.

Major companies and home users who are running up-to-date antivirus software should be safe from being infected by this virus, as most antivirus makers have now released updated signature definitions to detect and combat the virus.

Once the virus has been activated on February 3rd, it will proceed to delete any Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe PDF files from an infected computer system. The virus will also try to propagate both through e-mail and as a network worm, which can bring havoc to insecure closed networks. The virus probes computers on the network (or the internet if you are behind a firewall which blocks unwanted outgoing traffic) and will attempt to comprimise them, sending itself to as many computers as it can.

The virus hides in unsuspecting email attachment files, and may show up in your inbox with subject lines referring to pornography.